Mod review: Beyond Skyrim: Bruma

This is my no-spoilers review for the Skyrim mod Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, which I’ve finally now played. And now that Elessir’s playthrough is finished (even if I’m not done posting his posts yet), I can now finally post some commentary!

I’ll have a lot of spoiler-heavy commentary coming in Elessir’s playthrough posts; here, I’ll just keep it spoiler-free. So let’s get to it.

The core concept

Just about everybody who’s been playing with Skyrim mods longer than me most likely already knows about the Beyond Skyrim project. But just in case you don’t, it’s an ongoing project to expand out the play map to include all sorts of territory outside Skyrim, but still set in the same timeframe as the original game. It’s a very ambitious project, and last I checked, it has nearly a dozen different locations all being worked on by various teams of modders.

Bruma is technically not a completed mod, which I only realized once I started playing it and looking up stuff about what I encountered. It’s sort of a proof-of-concept and teaser for the forthcoming Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil. So the territory it covers is only the city of Bruma and some of the minor locations in the surrounding countryside. Kind of the equivalent of a single hold in Skyrim, with the primary city of the hold as well as surrounding locations.

Overall, it felt slightly smaller in terms of territory covered than Solstheim. Or, now that I’ve played a majority of it as well, Wyrmstooth.

There is a main questline to play for the city, with several steps to it. It’s not quite as long as some of the faction quests in Skyrim (such as the College of Winterhold or Dawnguard). And there are also a few side quests to run, though I’m not sure yet how many; I’m pretty sure I didn’t hit them all.

Stuff I liked

Bruma’s main quest… mostly

For the most part, except for one major issue I had with the ending of it (see below), I really liked how Bruma’s main quest plays out. There’s a character you meet in Bruma who becomes your main impetus for doing the city’s quest, and he’s great. He’s excellently performed, and he also has some very natural, very organic interactions with you that help move the quest along and bring you to each of its stages.

Most of the side quests I ran

Again, I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually hit all of the side quests available in the mod, but I did at least hit a few of the larger ones. These were all fun for the most part, with only a few minor quibbles. See next section.

World graphics and design

The entire worldspace was flat out lovely, and a pleasure to explore through. I know I didn’t hit all the locations, but I still had quite a bit of fun just riding around looking at stuff.

In particular, the city of Bruma looks suitably different from anything in Skyrim. Its architecture was a nice mix of Imperial and Nordic styles, as seems fitting for the city’s proximity to Skyrim. And, as I understand it, Bruma’s supposed to have a sizable Nord population as well. So it makes sense that that influence would be present in its architecture.

From what little I’ve played of Oblivion, and also from what visits I’ve done in ESO to Cyrodiil and other places with heavy Imperial influence, the overall design of the countryside seemed very much in theme with the lore of that part of Tamriel. And once I got out of the snowier portions of the territory closer to Skyrim, it was very nice to be riding through gentler country.

I kept thinking of a line Lucien often throws when you’re adventuring with him in the Rift–how that part of Skyrim very much reminds him of Cyrodiil. Here, I had the reverse of that, with the countryside around Bruma very much reminding me of the Rift–only green and summery-looking! So that was all very pleasant to look at.

Music

Bruma’s music was absolutely delightful. Having different background music to listen to after all the Skyrim I’ve been playing was great, and I was very pleased to learn that the soundtrack’s even available for free download. I will very likely be grabbing it.

I especially liked that the bards had their own songs to perform, too. I found those songs very solid both in terms of quality of performance, and quality of lyrics. Well done, Bruma musicians!

Player house in Bruma

There’s a splendid little player house you can get in Bruma as a quest reward for finishing the main quest. Very similarly to how you get various houses in Skyrim, once you get the house itself you can also pay to have it furnished and decorated. You only get it as a reward for finishing the primary quest, so be mindful of that and plan your storage needs accordingly. (Since the way in and out of Bruma is not far from Helgen, and by extension only slightly farther from Lakeview Manor, I did multiple trips to Lakeview to drop off stuff before I finished out that quest.)

I very much liked the overall design and layout of the place. Like the city it’s in, the house very much has an overall Imperial flavor to it, though not without a Nordic touch here and there, I think.

And it was almost perfect in its basement in terms of available crafting stations. The only thing I felt it lacked was a smelter, since I’m used to having one of those available in Lakeview, Windstad, and Heljarchen, as well as the various houses added by the AE. But this is only a minor quibble for me, really. Skyrim also has its share of player houses that don’t feature a smelter, such as all of the ones in the major cities. And like those player houses in the main game, the one in Bruma is certainly very near a smithy, so it’s not like it’s difficult to go smelt something if you really need to.

Voice acting, and NPCs in general

By and large, all the NPCs I interacted with for quests were excellently performed. I had a few minor quibbles with how some of their lines were written, but that’s a dialogue question, and not a question of performance. The one voice performance I didn’t like was for the character I actively disliked–and to be fair, his vocal delivery was in character, and that was way more of a question of the character being grating than it was of his being badly performed.

I was very pleased to see diversity in the NPCs represented in the city, too–with at least a few of all the races of Tamriel represented in Bruma’s population. That seems appropriate to me, given that Cyrodiil is supposed to be the center of the Empire.

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

Some of the side quests were bumpy in execution

I mostly liked all of the side quests I ran, though I found aspects of a couple of them bumpy in execution.

One quest in particular had a character asking me to go to location X to do task Y. And when I came back from doing that, the character then insisted on going with me to the same location to do task Z. So that running back and forth felt awkward.

For that same quest, there were also two very different endings. One of which was disturbing enough that I noped right out of that, rolled back to a prior save point, and went the other way just so I could have the better ending. For values of “better” meaning “not entirely happy, but at least not disturbing”.

Neither of those endings was inappropriate for the story in question, but still, I found that a bumpy play experience.

Factions

Certain factions have a presence in Bruma: the Fighters Guild, the College of Whispers, and the Synod. And while there is a pretty good side quest to be run with the mages, the Fighters Guild didn’t have any quest at all to run that I could see. So they seemed to mostly be in Bruma for atmosphere. Lore-appropriate atmosphere, to be sure. But it was still a little disappointing to not be able to even get a fetch quest or anything out of the Fighters Guild NPCs.

And none of these factions are joinable, either.

Still, though, I figure this ties into the whole question of Bruma being a preview for the larger release to come. So I do cut this some slack, even though it was a weird play experience.

Stuff I didn’t like

A certain bard character in a side quest

Since this is a spoiler-free review, I will not go into details of the plot that involves him–but suffice to say that there’s a bard character in Bruma that I found absolutely grating. There was nothing whatsoever likable about him. And I wasn’t terribly happy with my plot options in how to deal with him, either. More on this to come when I write up the relevant Elessir posts.

How my run through Bruma’s main quest ended

While I did mostly really like how Bruma’s main quest was implemented (see above), the one big beef I have with it is that depending on what choices you make during the course of the plot, there will most likely be an unfortunate and tragic outcome. I’m not going to go into details on this because spoilers, but I am going to warn the reader about this on a general level.

Because here’s the thing: there is absolutely nothing you can do about the outcome in question once it happens. The mod just hasn’t implemented action you can take yet. I’ve seen a Reddit thread where one of the Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil devs said that they are implementing a proper response you can take to this event. But that isn’t in Bruma.

As a writer, I absolutely think the event in question is narratively appropriate. And I get that since Bruma is a preview and not really the entire intended mod, that means by definition that I was only getting a taste of the final work.

But as a player, I found it really unsatisfying to close out Bruma’s main quest with that hanging over my Dragonborn as a thing he couldn’t actually do anything about or fix.

Also, from what I saw looking up information about the choices you can take during this plot, for me as a player, there was no way to avoid the unhappy outcome either. All other options were much less palatable choices to me. So the only course of action I felt it appropriate to play would, in fact, result in the unhappy outcome.

So be warned, players who haven’t run Bruma yet. Brace yourselves for this to happen.

And hopefully, it won’t be too much longer before Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil actually comes out, and we can see what the dev team has in mind for actually resolving the situation in question.

All in all

Even though I didn’t like the ending of the mod’s main quest, I was still glad I played through it. Since I’m planning a future playthrough with a modpack that specifically includes Bruma, chances are good I’ll play it again. And I definitely want to, since Elessir’s run didn’t really give me a chance to explore everything.

It’s definitely worth exploring, and I do recommend it.

And until Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil comes out, I’ll just have to take the liberty of making up my own headcanon about how to handle that plot ending!